Five Lives – a gritty new verbatim drama premieres in Exeter

Daniel Loveday’s drama Five Lives premieres at Exeter’s Cygnet Theatre on 3rd June. Daniel is a scriptwriter and composer whose work has been featured in one of NMN’s Snappy Title concerts. Although Five Lives is not a musical, Daniel has composed incidental music for it and some vocal harmonies.

Five Lives shines a light on five extraordinary women and their personal battles with drug and alcohol addiction, domestic violence, self-harming and homelessness. The five women, based in Exeter, wrote and published their stories and now they’ve helped to turn the book into a powerful verbatim play.

The play provides a true insight into a world where life is a soulless quest to find solace in a bottle or needle, where every day is spent living under the control of an abuser, where self-harming seems the only way out and where you feel shunned and isolated from the rest of society. However, there are also messages of hope, optimism and inspiration. The play charts the women’s first, tentative steps as writers, guided by their literacy tutor. It tells of the therapeutic benefits of writing and the decision to publish their stories.

The women, along with their tutor, Fiona Prideaux, and scriptwriter, Daniel Loveday, adapted the book into a stage play and added new stories not previously published. Director, John Somers, well known for his work in verbatim theatre and other forms of Applied Drama has worked with a talented cast to bring the drama alive.